Many countries require that electronic devices, such as radio communication devices, comply with regulatory constraints set by certain national or regional regulatory agencies, such as the Federal Communications Commission in the USA. Therefore, manufacturers exporting their devices to a country certify the devices before accepting orders from the country and providing shipments to the country. Thus manufacturers manage several stock keeping units (SKUs) that are groups of devices. Each SKU is certified for one or more countries, so that the devices of the SKU can be ordered and shipped to the countries.
In order to obtain certification of an electronic device, a manufacturer of the device configures device parameters of the product, such as frequency parameters of transmitters, to limit operation of the product within the regulatory constraints. A device parameter can be hardwired or can be set by data stored in a memory of the device. Since any modification to a device parameter can invalidate certifications of the device, manufacturers need to ensure that device parameters cannot be easily altered once devices are configured.
Therefore, a configuration file for device parameters is usually stored either in a Read Only Memory (ROM) or a reprogrammable non-volatile memory, such as FLASH, before the device is shipped to a destination. This means that manufacturers need maintain a large number of SKUs because there can be many standards (such as 802.11a and 802.11g) or device families, for which a device can be configured. Manufacturers frequently need to update their devices to accommodate new features or to fix unforseen errors and each update can result in a new SKU. Managing SKUs is costly and consumes a significant amount of resources.